The a-historical actor on the historical stage: American Studies, the cultural borderline personality, and John Sayles' Lone Star

Abstract

This essay contends that American Studies needs to adopt a performative approach, by considering what America does, not what it is, and what has been said and done in the name of America. Specifically, this essay examines how the Cold War cultural conditions from which American Studies emerged as a discipline isolated the disciplines in an academia that lacked a sense of its own historicity. This condition contributed to America's assuming the role of the a-historical actor on the historical stage, and helped allow the literal and figurative American borders to support narratives that assert, simultaneously, American exceptionalism and American normativity. For the illegal immigrant, whose labor masks the flaws in a marketplace economy, the American borders create cultural conditions that replicate for the emigrant the experience of borderline personality disorder. John Sayles' film, Lone Star (1996), thematizes and interrogates this problem, ultimately substituting contractual power relationships for the hierarchical or essentialist relations derived from the illusory authority of nation or race.

Keywords:

• ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT
• AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
• LONE STAR
• CULTURAL BORDERLINE
• TEXAS
• JOHN SAYLES

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alan Nadel

Alan Nadel, William T. Bryan Chair of American Literature and Culture at the University of Kentucky, is the author of several books including Containment Culture and, most recently, Television in Black-and-White America: Race and National Identity.